Batting on to win a score

Regaining a starring role in a musical can take time, discovers Jim Murphy.

As Deidre Rubenstein stood each night in the wings, listening to the overture to the Production Company's Bye Bye Birdie in July, the old feeling came flooding back. "I was thrilled by just the sound of that orchestra," she sighs, recalling the moment. "There is nothing like it."

Playing the scene-stealing Mae Peterson in the 1960s rock'n'roll satire rekindled Rubenstein's love of musical comedy, and she emerged from that four-night season determined to reactivate that side of her performing talents.

Audiences haven't seen her in a musical since the Nimrod Theatre production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide at the Comedy Theatre 20 years ago, but that is how she started her career. One of her first roles after graduating from NIDA was Hortense, the saucy French maid, in a 1968 revival of the spoof 1920s musical, The Boy Friend.

Now she is excited to be part of Bat Boy: The Musical, an off-Broadway award-winner based on articles in the American tabloid Weekly World News, about a boy with pointy ears and sharp teeth discovered living in a cave in West Virginia.

Rubenstein plays Meredith, a veterinarian's wife. They take the strange child into their home and raise him as their own, but as he grows up he comes face-to-face with the perils of being "different" in a small town.

"It uses the Weekly World News articles as a springboard for a piece that is satirical, but at the same time has very serious themes," Rubenstein says. "It is Oedipal, it's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, it's all about civilising the primitive and about not denying our own beast inside. It's about integrating yourself as a person, and secrets having to come out, and reparation having to be made, and religious hypocrisy . . .

"It packs a real punch," she says, "but it is also screamingly funny. I think it will have great appeal to the youth audience. It's so much better than The Rocky Horror Show or Little Shop of Horrors because it works on so many levels.

"It's very, very clever. Bat boy gets civilised in the course of one song - he goes from being this grunting creature to discussing Copernicus in the same song. One of my lines is, 'These BBC language tapes are really helping your diction'."

One of the attractions for Rubenstein is that Bat Boy stretches her as a performer. "I run the gamut in this," she says. "It's a huge acting role and a huge singing role. The range in my ballad covers two-and-a-half octaves. And we have to be thrown to the ground, cry, scream, all manner of things happen."

As a result of doing Bat Boy, she hopes producers will realise that she is more than a serious theatre and screen actress. While she was getting raves for performances in such prestige productions as the Melbourne Theatre Company's Life X 3 last year and winning an AFI Award for her role in the television drama Palace of Dreams, previous attempts to return to musicals got nowhere.

"I didn't go with Judi Connelli and Geraldine Turner in terms of that commercial theatre world, so I think people probably overlook me. I couldn't get in to audition for 42nd Street . . . Auditioning for (one of the wives in) The Full Monty recently was fantastic. I didn't get the role - they cast it younger because they cast the husband younger - but the Americans were so lovely that it was very affirming for me."

Rubenstein says the highlight of her career was discovering solo performing when Michael Easton approached her to do a show on American writer Dorothy Parker. It started at the Arts Centre on a Sunday afternoon, and grew into a season at the Fairfax, then a revival at Mietta's and a season at the Stables in Sydney.

"It sold out everywhere," she says. "People just loved hearing that wonderful wit and language. I chose nine of her poems for Michael Easton to set to music and I condensed her short stories and articles. It was terrific to do and it felt like destiny for me.

"I followed it with What's a Girl To Do?, for which I chose monologue-y poems by Australian women writers about life's journey. Confidentially Yours followed, for which she commissioned playwrights to write for her. "I did that at the Playbox and at arts festivals in Hong Kong and Zimbabwe and in England and America, and again people were just knocked out by the writing."

Bat Boy: The Musical now on at The Loft at Chapel off Chapel, Prahran, until September 28.